Eviction notice

"The day the stars began to drift away, no trumpet sounded; no sky cracked. Astronomers at Maunakea noticed it first - a faint, persistent recession of the galaxies, as though the cosmos had exhaled and decided not to inhale. Within a week, every telescope on Earth confirmed the impossible: the Hubble flow had accelerated overnight, and the acceleration was uniform, deliberate, polite."

"Mara Ekwueme, theoretical cosmologist and reluctant insomniac, was alone in the control room when the pattern emerged. The redshift data were not random: they formed a lattice of avoidance. Every spiral arm in the local group was nudged outwards along vectors that, if drawn on a chart, spelled a single word in the angular alphabet of gravitational equipotentials: Go. She whispered the word aloud and felt the room cool by several degrees. The air itself seemed embarrassed to carry the sound."

"They published a two-page note in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The world shrugged. Markets dipped, then recovered when no asteroid followed the memo. Priests debated on television; late-night hosts made eviction jokes. Humanity, as usual, was too busy to be terrified by subtleties. But Mara kept watching. She found that if she binned the recession velocities by galactic metallicity, a second message appeared - fainter, encrypted in the jitter of Type Ia supernovae."

Stars across the sky began to drift outward as the Hubble flow accelerated uniformly, first detected by astronomers at Maunakea. Redshift measurements revealed a lattice of avoidance that, when mapped, spelled the single imperative 'Go.' Theoretical cosmologist Mara Ekwueme identified the pattern alone in the control room and saw additional structure in recession velocities binned by galactic metallicity. A fainter, encrypted signal appeared in Type Ia supernova jitter, which translated into a message identifying dark matter as ancient, slow civilizations. These civilizations had abandoned light and electromagnetism for longevity, living cold between stars and influencing gravity to shepherd luminous life.

Read at Nature